The Size of Our Bed

The poems from The Size of Our Bed start with a section of a letter to a dead husband. The remaining poems traverse Armenian, English/German ancestry; marriage; others; illness and death; recovery and the bloody spine of war, always war. Jacqueline Tchakalian conjures these generous yet unflinching poems as though knowledge lodged in her bones and belly, an invisible force, had been lurking, waiting for her to peel back the visor of ignorance and disregard, with the shape and sound of poetry; its vessel acceptance, its mouth hard won wisdom and protest.